


the season you live in

by yoonbot (iverins)



Category: PRISTIN (Band), SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Past Relationship(s), Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-31
Updated: 2019-07-31
Packaged: 2020-07-23 14:55:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20010169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iverins/pseuds/yoonbot
Summary: If the law of conservation of mass dictates that matter can neither be created or destroyed, maybe that means when you lose someone close to you, someone else you thought you lost years ago comes back.





	the season you live in

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tonyang (kurusui)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kurusui/gifts).



> I’m still living in that season // This is it, I know it’s over // I know everything now // The winter of you  
> Is passing
> 
> \-- Day6, "Goodbye Winter"
> 
> **to dearest risa,**
> 
> I KNOW YOUR BIRTHDAY WAS LIKE 4 MONTHS AGO... i wanted to write you some kind of nysc then... that said i'm sorry it turned out like this ㅠㅠ i feel like you're truly the heart behind this fic fest and aside from the belated birthday present, wanted to give back ♡ i hope you find some enjoyment in this nonetheless, love you!! ♡♡
> 
> also, huge thank you to the other nayoungseungcheolists ♡ this wouldn't have been possible without all of you!!
> 
> [playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1tVODGQ5yVsj1g7LWik1Ay?si=OM_E8lfARMeSkGCN28mA2w)

If you have a choice: don’t break your own heart.

\-- SOMEONE, NAME FORGOTTEN

They see each other again only because her grandmother has died.

Death has this weird way of bringing people together, or so Nayoung likes to think as she slips her shoes on to step outside for some air. There's something about a loss so fresh that it carries in the pockets of your clothes, lingers over every friendly encounter at the supermarket with a _I'm sorry that this was the only way to bring us back together_ kind of pressed-together smile, makes you sad by association when your six-year-old nephew who maybe visited once since Nayoung moved back three years ago starts bawling alongside his mother. There's almost a kitschy sense of tragedy surrounding it all – and Nayoung only realizes that she’s forgotten her coat in the hall after she cuts through a pile of snow that soaks through her loafers, the cold biting at her toes – except the mid-January wind turns her nose red and ticklish with the promise of tears. She exhales, watching as the white of her breath reaches towards the sun, dissipates into nothing. No, she thinks. The tragedy’s real.

This is how Seungcheol finds her: leaning against the awning of the parking lot wearing her grandmother's old knit cardigan, looking up at the pale wintry blue sky from under the shade, cut into neat shapes from the overhanging power lines. He just stands there in front of her, hands in his pockets for the longest time, completely silent. And Nayoung, for the longest time, doesn’t look at him either. It’s weird to think that they have nothing to say to each other now.

“Hey,” he tells her eventually. Harmless, inconsequential, monosyllabic. _Hey._ That’s it. When she searches Seungcheol’s face for a hint of a smile, she comes back with hands outstretched, but empty. It’s almost like he’s been green-screened into this backdrop, this building they used to bike past on their way to school when they were younger. It’s almost like he’s not even here.

Nayoung feels her eyes watering, and her nose running, but, in all truth, she’s not crying. “Hey,” she manages in return, looking at where he’s standing a little ways down the slope of the driveway, where the snow’s been cleared. If this was a war, she’d have the advantage, being on higher ground. That kind of thing doesn’t matter anymore though, she has to remind herself. That kind of thing doesn’t matter anymore.

But distance does that to people. Makes them strangers, even when a familiarity collects at the crow’s feet that appear around his eyes when he pushes his lips into a small smile. “You’ll catch a cold out here like this,” Seungcheol says, like in the absence of everything else, they'll still always know each other. “C’mon,” he turns without checking if she’ll follow, like he’s forgotten everything, like it’s all cool between them now, that what's passed is past, “I’ll walk you back in.” But that’d be a lie, you know?

Some things, truthfully, Nayoung’s forgotten, too. Other things – inside, her socks leave wet imprints on the floorboards after his like footprints against the scalding hot concrete after getting out of the pool in the summer, walking home with their swimsuits soaking through their clothes, the water collecting in their sandals – Nayoung closes her eyes and can’t help but remember.

Summers in Jincheon were always hot but the summer before Kaeun left for university was almost unbearably so.

"You can visit me during your break," she told Nayoung as they scooped up spoonfuls of watermelon in her kitchen, sitting in front of the fan. Kaeun's family used to live in this tall apartment complex with a been-there-since-Nayoung's-been-old-enough-to-remember advertisement pasted on its side that read, in faded fancy lettering, _Vivache._ According to her grandmother, it was some sort of perfume, but growing up, they'd all learned to refer to the 7-Eleven down the street from it as the _Vivache 7._ Sometime when Nayoung was in college, they'd changed building management and repainted the entire side a creamy off-white that she still can't get used to. "I'll show you around Seoul," Kaeun continued, smiling around the spoon in her mouth. "I'll know where all the good places are by then."

Nayoung swallowed the Sprite she'd waterfalled from the liter bottle Kaeun found in her fridge. "Call," she replied coolly. Kaeun nudged her shoulder with her own at that and laughed.

That was the summer they'd wheedled Jonghyun into playing hooky at his _hagwon,_ the summer Seungcheol helped out at his uncle's swimming pool, cleaning up after kids, and got them in for free three times, the summer they biked to Nayoung's after one of those times, tracking the pool water saturated in their swimsuits all over the floor, and screamed, mopping up their mess in a hurry when they realized her grandmother was coming back from grocery shopping earlier than expected. Jeonghan charmed her pants off helping her shelve things away while the rest of them tried not to betray the trouble they'd caused on their faces, which went well until Seungcheol, unable to hold it all in, laughed until his eyes watered, holding his stomach on the floor. Instead of getting mad after they brokenly explained what happened through peals of laughter, her grandmother just chuckled along with them and started up the washing machine.

Initially, they were friends out of circumstance. Their parents were friends, or had been, at some point in time. It was like this: Nayoung's mom was friends with Seungcheol's mom, and Seungcheol's mom had ended up at the same university as Kaeun's dad, and Kaeun's dad grew up with Jonghyun's dad, and they'd all had children within a year of each other. Kaeun came first, a year before the rest of them, and then Jonghyun, Seungcheol, Jeonghan, and, in the winter, finally Nayoung, and then running into each other while picking up their kids from school became meeting up at the park on weekends and gossiping while trying to teach their kids how to ride their bikes, and helping each other babysit during the week once they found work again, and Seungcheol giving a crying Nayoung her Hello Kitty lunch box back in primary school before getting sent home early for fighting with the kid who stole it in the first place. They ate together in the month after that, Nayoung handing him her banana milks as a tacit _I'm sorry_ and _Thank you,_ and Seungcheol gave her his wide, toothy smile when she put her lunch bag down next to his every time.

It was like this: Kaeun, who was a grade older, had her other friends, and Jonghyun had his baseball team, and Seungcheol and Jeonghan had their own classmates, and Nayoung only really had them. It was like: that same summer before Kaeun moved for university, Nayoung biked home from the library with Jonghyun one day, wiped the sweat from her upper lip when he wasn’t looking, and told him she liked him.

He turned his gaze down to his handlebars instead of to her. That's when Nayoung knew he didn't feel the same.

"You know," he'd told her a couple years later when he visited her in Seoul at her university and she treated him to barbecue. Jonghyun smiled, piling meat onto her plate. "I always thought it'd be you and Seungcheol."

At that point in time, it was. Eighteen months later, it wasn't anymore, and Jeonghan told her over coffee one day that she'd been rejected all those years before because Jonghyun was gay.

But a lot changed over that summer. Nayoung didn't realize it then, but the day they'd sent Kaeun off to the station was the first day of a week of on-and-off summer storms and the first day she stopped going to the library to study with Jonghyun. That night, she and Seungcheol sat in his dim living room, the practice exams they were too distracted to finish taking strewn all over the coffee table, contemplating their futures.

"I think whatever happens," Nayoung remembers him telling her, though she can't remember now how they'd ended up on the subject. "We'll always find our way back to each other."

The rain pounded against the small, loose-tiled balcony outside. Nayoung turned her head from where she was resting it on the couch to look at him, tinged ochre in the muted light. He and Jeonghan always joked that she looked at people a little too seriously sometimes. "Promise?" she remembers asking. Maybe this had been one of them.

He reached for her pinky and folded it with his. "Promise," he grinned. That was the summer, Nayoung knows now, that was the beginning of the end.

"You drive now."

Nayoung turns to look at him, car keys cold in her hand. The sole street lamp illuminating the parking lot colors him in honey, the edges of him blurred into the early dusk of winter. "Yeah," she says to his faint smile. It's funny because by the time they all started primary school, Nayoung had been the one between them to be too scared to ride her bike without training wheels. "Jeonghan taught me."

Jeonghan had also been the one, the February she'd graduated, to pick her up at the train station. He'd pulled up to the curb in his dad's hand-me-down Sonata, rolled down the window and peered over his knock-off brand name sunglasses at her. "Guess it's just you and me," he'd said in place of _Hey, haven't seen you in years, how've you been?_

Kaeun was somewhere in Japan, and Jonghyun was starting graduate school, and Seungcheol was wherever she'd left him in the snow two months ago, without looking back. Nayoung let her mouth pull up at the corners. "Guess so," she'd replied before loading her things into the trunk.

"Oh." Seungcheol's breath creates clouds, even in the darkness. It'd always been so easy to read him that it went all the way around the bend and became hard again. Or maybe over the years, Nayoung's just lost her touch. "That's nice," he tells her, so sincere that she's convinced he can't be serious.

But that’s just how Seungcheol was. Nayoung remembers these brief, disconnected moments from that first year she moved back home after university. Like the weeks she and Jeonghan went without texting each other, only to message back and forth for hours out of the blue. Her locked Instagram Minkyung goaded her into making to, "Keep in touch," Minkyung said close to her ear when they'd hugged before Nayoung moved out of their apartment. "I know you'll drop off the face of the Earth otherwise." Three months later, when she'd been browsing through the accounts of people whose phone numbers were saved into her contact list, she'd chanced upon Seungcheol's profile, covered with pictures of his smiling face. It was like without her, his world had never stopped turning, and that was just reality. It stung like picking at a scab that hadn't healed in its entirety, re-exposing the raw wound underneath.

In her absentmindedness, she realized too late that she'd liked one of his posts. Nayoung covered her face with her pillow, groaning, and Jeonghan laughed when she told him about it the next day. A week later, when curiosity got the better of her, she found that Seungcheol had set his Instagram on private, too.

As the silence consumes them again, Nayoung remembers, briefly, the heartache that gnawed at her when she missed him in those months. Maybe it's out of that nostalgia, or out of an instinct from the twenty years they spent riding their bikes home together that she thought she'd long outgrown, that she nods toward her car.

"Where were you staying again?" Nayoung asks before she can think better of it. "I'll drive you back."

It was Seungcheol who asked her out. On his birthday, the summer before they left for university.

"You don't have to say yes or anything!" he'd been quick to say, holding his hands up. "I mean – it doesn't have to be a date either, I just – " Nayoung watched as he scratched the back of his neck, littered with stray hairs, where he'd recently gotten a haircut, "I mean it when I say I like you."

The sun setting beyond the road they'd been walking down burned everything pink, and Nayoung couldn't tell if it was Seungcheol blushing or the rose-tinted glow from the sky. She felt the smile take root, grow on her own face. "Yes," she told him. "I'd like that, Seungcheol."

He'd pumped his fist into the air, whooping before realizing she was laughing at him and sheepishly put his hand down. The _kalguksu_ restaurant they ate at that night closed down years ago, but Nayoung hadn't stepped foot in it since.

It was Seungcheol who'd wait outside on the steps of the buildings she'd have lectures in, on the days he didn't have class. Their universities were thirty minutes apart in Seoul, and he'd show up unannounced just to surprise her. Nayoung would catch a glimpse of his familiar back and run all the way down, pushing his shoulders. He'd pretend she got him every time.

"You two are gross," Minkyung had commented after Nayoung came back from walking Seungcheol to the bus stop. "Teeth-rottingly _gross._ "

Nayoung crossed in front of the fan Minkyung had focused on herself and laughed when she'd gotten a glare in response. "Wait 'til you fall in love," she grinned, flopping down on the sofa next to her. She prodded Minkyung's sticky ankle with her toe. "Then you'll see."

And it was Seungcheol who used to look over his shoulder to make sure she was still there. Back when it'd been the five of them, and Nayoung had finally gotten over her training wheels, and they'd all taken turns racing down the long stretch of empty road near where Jonghyun lived, he'd shaken his sweaty bangs out of his eyes and let her win with a wide, toothy smile on his face. And it'd been Seungcheol who stayed with her when the rest of them biked down to the Vivache 7 for antiseptic and band-aids after she's scraped her knees so badly that it made her eyes water, who held his umbrella over her when she'd forgotten hers on the way home from studying late at his, who looked at her like she'd flown up into the universe and hung the stars up for him.

"That's how he looks at everyone," she'd told Kaeun over the phone a month before he asked her out, twisting the cord with her fingers idly. She didn't want to think too much of it, just in case it turned out to be nothing.

She heard Kaeun sigh over the line. "Yeah," she echoed. "But it's like – _different._ When he's with you. Haven't you noticed?"

Last summer, Nayoung and Jeonghan sat on her grandmother's old sofa late at night after they'd put her to bed, watching a movie that they'd both heard was good but was, truthfully, to neither of their tastes. It played in the background, lighting their faces in the otherwise dark, when Jeonghan asked her, "What changed between you?"

"I think," Nayoung began. They'd breached the subject a couple times before, but Jeonghan never went too far. That night, for some reason, Nayoung felt it flooding out of her. "We grew up or something." She screwed her eyes shut. "That I put up these, these – _walls_ and," when she opened them again, Jeonghan wasn't looking at her, as if respecting the privacy of her innermost thoughts, "he just learned to let me."

She saw a flash of the main character in the film, reflected in Jeonghan's eyes. "I think," Nayoung continued. She didn't notice it until then, but she'd been pulling at the strings of the bamboo cover of her seat the entire time. "I think I make things hard for myself."

Jeonghan had told her once that it'd always made sense to him. Nayoung and Seungcheol. That they'd all been close, but they'd all known, quietly, that the two of them would always put each other first if prompted. He'd said it with a smile, and it was the first time, even after the childhood Nayoung had spent on the fringes of Jeonghan's life, that she realized he wasn't really smiling about anything at all.

"And you two had always been so stubborn in your own separate ways," he'd went on. It was strange to discover someone you'd thought nearly impossible to read had been so transparent this entire time. Nayoung didn't stop herself from looking at him, or the deceptively easy curve of his mouth.

And, looking back at her, he'd said: "I think – "

The car ride between them is unsurprisingly quiet.

In their last year of university, they'd started making these plans for their life afterwards. Nayoung was graduating in the winter, and Seungcheol not until the summer. She'd find a great job in Seoul and show up late to his ceremony, running in still wearing her work clothes just as his name was called, and he'd find her in the crowd.

She used to laugh when he'd act out the scene. "What if you don't see me?" she challenged him.

"No," he grinned into her shoulder, curling around her from where they were sitting on her and Minkyung's couch. "I'll always find you."

Nayoung didn't end up going to his graduation at all. They'd broken up before hers too, and it'd been too awkward for him to come and congratulate her, so they were even in a sense. In the silence aside from the engine of her secondhand car humming, it makes Nayoung wonder. What happens to all the plans you've made together when the person you made them with fades out of your life?

"I'm staying with my aunt," Seungcheol said while they waited for the heater to start up. Nayoung had seen her the other day at the supermarket, actually. After ringing up the total, she'd given Nayoung her employee discount. It'd made Nayoung feel like a villain funnily enough, but she couldn't find a way to tell him this. He'd looked at her, and then anywhere but at her, and then back at her again. "I'm leaving tomorrow."

"Oh," it'd been Nayoung's turn to say. "That's soon." Just details in the fewest words possible, and then nothing once more.

Five minutes away from Seungcheol's, he suddenly speaks up again. "Sorry, can you stop the car?" he blurts.

Nayoung slows. Look around. There's no one out but them, and there's only this small stretch of road and the nearby apartment buildings growing taller as they approach, and an overhead street light causing the drops left behind by a few melted snowflakes to scintillate on her windshield. She turns toward him, puts the car in park. "Is something wrong?"

"Sorry, I just – " Seungcheol cuts himself off. He lets go of the cup holder next to his seat that he'd been gripping so hard that his knuckles turned pale. "If I don't say this before I leave, I think I'll regret it for the rest of my life."

"Okay," Nayoung replies more by reflex. In truth, she doesn't know what she should say, and though the silence between them had stretched uncomfortably, she's not sure that this is better by comparison. Instead, she adverts her gaze to the drops on the windshield, tracing characters with her eyes. "Okay." Maybe it is just a side-effect of humanity, to look for faces in everything we see.

He sucks in a breath. It is so, so loud in the dark. "I shouldn't have fought with you like that," he begins. "I should've said, 'It's okay' when you said you wanted to move back here. 'We'll be okay either way,' or 'If I have work to do, the ride from Seoul isn't long at all.'" Nayoung hears him exhale, shakily. "And when we made up, when you said that you didn't blame me for being stubborn, I should've told you I knew I was wrong. I should've told you 'Sorry' and 'Thank you for loving such a bonehead like me, anyway.'"

Nayoung looks at him. Maybe two years ago, she would've smiled at that admission. She didn't realize, but she hadn't been looking at him until now, and his eyes shine like those drops she'd been staring at on the windshield. "And I should've chased after you that day we broke up." Seungcheol was that kind of person – heart on his sleeve, looked right into your eyes and listened to you talk about nothing in particular, loved like he was born to do it. Nayoung didn't think she'd ever forget, but it feels like a memory so far away from her now.

"Sometimes I find myself thinking about it, like _what if I didn't let you go that day?_ " A car passes by them outside and Seungcheol just looks at her, so earnest, so much like the boy Nayoung always thought she'd end up with. "I shouldn't have let you go that day."

But some things, truthfully, Nayoung's forgotten. “It’s not your fault,” she tells him. She reaches for Seungcheol's hand across the console, hitting the gear shift before she finds it. “It’s not your fault, Seungcheol.”

Other things – in the cold of winter, his palm is so much warmer than she recalls, flat against hers – Nayoung closes her eyes and can't help but remember.

Near the end it was like this:

"I'm sorry," her grandmother told her the first night Nayoung had helped her wash up. "You should be out there in the city, doing whatever it is young people do these days. But you're here, helping your old grandmother." She'd smiled sadly as Nayoung fetched some towels. "I'm sorry."

Nayoung shook her head. "No," she said. _I want to be here._ "The job at uncle's office is enough for me." _After you spent all those years raising me, it's my turn to help you,_ she didn't know how to say less plainly. Nayoung doesn't know why but she cried herself to sleep that night.

Near the end it was like this:

The summer before their last year of university, Nayoung came to the realization that the pull of gravity in Seungcheol's dreams was Seoul. That after his military service, their dream selves would build their careers downtown and take their kids to the Han River and, maybe when that was over and all their work was done, they'd move back to Jincheon. That, after all this time they'd grown up together, Nayoung realized that the summer before Kaeun started university had just been pressing start on the countdown timer of them growing into themselves, different from the people they'd been in the sunset when Seungcheol first asked her out.

Sometime after she'd moved back, she and Jeonghan stood out in the rain, waiting for a train to pass, and somehow ended up on the topic of the five of them as kids, growing up. "I used to like you so much," Jeonghan admitted, laughing to an overcast sky. "I don't think you ever knew, did you?"

"Oh." Nayoung felt her cheeks flush. They'd just come from the outdoor market, and she'd unapologetically called him, "Terrifying," when he'd flattered an auntie into giving him a half-price discount. "You're terrifying, Yoon Jeonghan, you know that."

He'd grinned at that, walking backwards to face her. "That's why you're glad to have me on your side, right?"

It all kind of made sense to her, then. " _Oh,_ " she repeated. And he'd kept laughing, but Nayoung couldn't figure out what exactly was so funny. She remembers biting her lower lip carefully, thinking about it. "What about now?" she'd asked, and then the train was gone.

And some other time: " – we build walls, hoping others will tear them down." The rain pounded against the windows outside. His voice was gentle like the smell of the pavement at the end of a storm. "We say _what if,_ hoping _some day._ "

Jeonghan had been looking at her, then. Strangely, that's when Nayoung realized no matter how many coats she'd worn through, she'd been holding onto this thing, this idea that Seungcheol would always be the perfect one for her, carried in the outline of her pockets this entire time. And, after all these years, without Seungcheol there, Nayoung finally looked back.

Here, in the car with Seungcheol, Nayoung thinks.

When Nayoung is seven and still too scared to ride her own bike without the training wheels, Seungcheol lets her sit behind him on his and tells her, "Don't let go, okay?"

When Nayoung is twenty-seven, parked on the shoulder of an empty street, headlights of her car still on, she falls out of love with Choi Seungcheol.

Nayoung lets go. She scrapes both her elbows on the concrete and bleeds all over her favorite jacket that she'd tied around her waist, and when Kaeun, Jonghyun, and Jeonghan come back with a plastic bag from the convenience store, she screws her eyes shut as they press the antiseptic against her wounds.

She smiles, opens her eyes, Seungcheol's hand still in hers. And then, of the summer where it all began, and the winter where it ended, Nayoung lets go.

**Author's Note:**

> [twitter](https://twitter.com/bewearer) // [cc](https://curiouscat.me/715creeks) (｡･･｡)


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